JUNKINS AGAIN
The fenders were clickin the guard-rail posts,
The guys beside me were just as white as ghosts.
One says, “Slow down, I see spots,
The lines in the road just look like dots.”
Arnie pulled into Da. nell’s Garage about an hour later. His rider—if there really had been a rider—was long gone. The smell was gone too; it had undoubtedly been just an illusion. If you hung around the shitters for long enough, Arnie reasoned, everything started to smell like shit. And that made them happy, of course.
Will was sitting behind his desk in his glassed-in office, eating a hoagie. He raised one drippy hand but didn’t come out. Arnie blipped his horn and parked.
It had all been some kind of dream. Simple as that. Some crazy kind of dream. Calling home, calling Leigh, trying to call Dennis and having that nurse tell him Dennis was in Physical Therapy—it was like being denied three times before the cock crew, or something. He had freaked a little bit. Anyone would have freaked, after the shitstorm he’d been through since August. It was all a question of perspective, after all, wasn’t it? All his life he had been one thing to people, and now he was coming out of his shell, turning into a normal everyday person with normal everyday concerns. It was not at all surprising that people should resent this, because when someone changed
(for better or worse, for richer or poorer) it was natural for people to get a little weird about it. It fucked up their perspective.
Leigh has spoken as if she thought he was crazy, and that was nothing but bullshit of the purest ray serene. He had been under strain, of course he had, but strain was a natural part of life. If Miss High-Box-Oh-So-Preppy Leigh Cabot thought otherwise, she was in for an abysmal fucking at the hands of that all-time champion rapist, Life. She’d probably end up taking Big Reds to get out of first gear in the morning and Nembies or “Ludes to come down at night.
Ah, but he wanted her—even now, thinking about her, he felt a great, unaccountable, unnameable desire sweep through him like cold wind, making him squeeze Christine’s wheel fiercely in his hands. It was a hot wanting too great, too elemental, for naming. It was its own force.
But he was all right now. He felt he had… crossed the last bridge, or something.
He had come back to himself sitting in the middle of a narrow access road beyond the farthest parking-lot reaches of the Monroeville Mail—which meant he was roughly halfway to California. Getting out, looking behind the car, he had seen a hole smashed through a snowbanks and there was melting snow sprayed across Christine’s hood. Apparently he had lost control, gone skating across the lot (which, even with the Christmas shopping season in full swing, was mercifully empty this far out), and had crashed through the bank. Damn lucky he hadn’t been in an accident. Damn lucky.
He had sat there for a while, listening to the radio and looking through the windscreen at the half-moon floating overhead. Bobby Helms had come on singing “Jingle Bell Rock”, a Sound of the Season, as the deejays said, and he had smiled a little, feeling better. He couldn’t remember what exactly it was that he had seen (or thought he had seen), and he didn’t really want to. Whatever it had been, it was the first and last time. He was quite sure of that. People had gotten him imagining things. They’d probably be delighted if they knew… but he wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction.
Things were going to be better all the way “around. He would mend his fences at home—in fact, could start tonight by watching some TV with his folks, just like in the old days. And he would win Leigh back. If she didn’t like the car, no matter how weird her reasons were, fine. Maybe he would, even buy another car sometime soon and tell her he had traded Christine in. He could keep Christine-here, rent space. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. And Will. This was going to be his last run for Will, this coming weekend. That bullshit had gone just about far enough; he could feel it. Let Will think he was a chicken if that’s what he wanted to think. A felony rap for interstate transport of unlicensed cigarettes and alcohol wouldn’t look all that hot on his college application, would it? A Federal felony rap. No. Not too cool.
He laughed a little. He did feel better. Purged. On his way over to the garage he ate his pizza even though it was cold. He was ravenous. It had struck him a bit peculiar that one piece was gone—in fact, it made him a bit uneasy—but he dismissed it. He had probably eaten it during that strange blank period, or maybe even thrown it out the window. Whoo, that had been spooky. No more of that shit. And he had laughed again, this time a little less shakily.
Now be got out of the car, slammed the door, and started toward Will’s office to find out what he had for him to do this evening. It suddenly occurred to him that tomorrow was the last day of school before the Christmas vacation, and that put an extra spring in his step.
That was when the side door, the one beside the big carport door, opened and a man let himself in. It was Junkins. Again.
He saw Arnie looking at him and raised a hand. “Hi, Arnie.”
Arnie glanced at Will. Through the glass, Will shrugged and went on eating his hoagie.
“Hello,” Arnie said. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Junkins said. He smiled, and then his eyes slid past Arnie to Christine, appraising, looking for damage. “Do you want to do something for me?”
“Not fucking likely,” Arnie said. He could feel his head starting to throb with rage again.
Rudy Junkins smiled, apparently unoffended.
“I just dropped by. How you been?”
He stuck out his hand. Arnie only looked at it. Not embarrassed in the slightest, Junkins dropped his hand, walked around to Christine, and began examining her again. Arnie watched him, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white. He felt a fresh pulse of anger each time Junkins dropped one of his hands onto Christine.
“Look, maybe you ought to buy a season ticket or something,” Arnie said. “Like to the Steelers games.”
Junkins turned and looked at him questioningly.
“Never mind,” Arnie said sullenly.
Junkins went on looking. “You know,” he said, it’s a hell of a strange thing, what happened to Buddy Repperton and those other two boys, isn’t it?”
Fuck it, Arnie thought. I’m not going to fool around with this shitter.
“I was in Philadelphia. Chess tourney.”
“I know,” Junkins said.
“Jesus! You’re really checking me out!”
Junkins walked back to Arnie. There was no smile on his face now. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “I’m checking you out. Three of the boys I believe were involved in vandalizing your car are now dead, along with a fourth boy who was apparently just along for the ride on Tuesday night. That’s a pretty big coincidence. It’s nine miles too big for me. You bet I’m checking you out.”
Arnie stared at him, surprised out of his anger, uncertain. “I thought it was an accident… that they were liquored up and speeding and—”
“There was another car involved,” Junkins said.
“How do you know that?”
“There were tracks in the snow, for one thing. Unfortunately, the wind had blurred them too much for us to be able to get a decent photo. But one of the barriers at the Squantic Hills State Park gate was broken, and we found traces of red paint on it. Buddy’s Camaro wasn’t red. It was blue.”
He measured Arnie with his eyes.
“We also found traces of red paint embedded in Moochie Welch’s skin, Arnie. Can you dig that? Embedded. Do you know how hard a car has to hit a guy to embed paint in his skin?”
“You ought to go out there and start counting red cars,” Arnie said coldly. “You’ll be up to twenty before you
